The wide-screen 16×9 format and resolution is clearly the defacto standard across televisions and computer monitors – you’d be hard pressed to purchase a 4×3 setup nowadays. While the format aligns well with television and movies, for me it really isn’t ideal in the field of computers. If you think about it, how often are you scrolling within an application window horizontally? Almost never right? Instead, almost all scrolling on a computer screen involves the vertical component – something that is a premium on the wide-screen layout.

Consequently, saving any amount of pixels in the vertical resolution is quite advantageous, especially when web browsing. If you are a Firefox user are familiar with the status bar across the bottom of the browser window – it contains feedback centering around the web page loading process. To reclaim some screen real estate you are probably already aware of how to disable the status bar from View->Status Bar.

However doing such, you now miss out on some valuable feed back as you browse around the Internet; such as whether the site you are reading is fully downloaded and displayed for example.

Leveraging the Firefox extension Fission, it’s quite trivial to consolidate the progress bar functionality found in the lower status bar with the address bar found at the top of the browser. Once installed, Fission will paint a user specific color across the address bar window in increments respective of the actual web site loading process.

Browsers such as Safari and Chrome have addressed the vertical real estate problem using similar solutions but until Fission, Firefox lagged behind. The UI tweak is minimalistic but the functionality is actually quite helpful for all users, not just those that wish to utilize every last pixel.

Download Fission

One of the major features of Firefox that keeps users glued to the browser are it’s vast array of extensions or browser add-ons. Unfortunately, our dependency on those few critical add-ons keep us from aggressively upgrading to the latest Firefox release. Not running the latest and greatest software is generally taboo in the enthusiasts culture. However, if the jump is made too early we are often left with buggy and broken extensions which have yet to be adjusted to function cleanly in the new release. This uncomfortable situation will be forth-coming later this year, when Firefox pushes out version 4.0 – currently in a multi-stage beta release cycle. In a perfect world, all the major extensions will be compatible upon it’s release but that’s often not the case. Worse, for the niche extensions they may never be updated.

Unfortunately, there does not exist a quick and efficient way to ensure what add-ons will break upon the upgrade short of just making the jump and picking up the pieces afterward. Clearly not an ideal situation!

Here are a few of the add-ons installed on one of my Firefox profiles.

Is It Compatible? is a simple Firefox extension that queries the Mozilla add-on repository and returns what version range the extension is compatible with. Notice how it has changed my add-ons window from above to what it is now below:

You can see that Greasemonkey is not yet compatible with the beta releases of Firefox 4 – it shows a range of 1.5-3.6.*. If you rely on just a few key add-ons, then browsing the Mozilla repository directly isn’t much of a burden but any more than a handful, it quickly becomes cumbersome. Is It Compatible? is then a godsend for you.

Should you feel more adventurous, it is possible to force Firefox to run incompatible extensions but the actual results can vary – some add-ons just have a version-check string that prevents them being enabled in Firefox releases it can’t recognize. Others can be much more complicated; for these it will ultimately require the developer to update the extension.

Download Is It Compatible?

Taskbar previews, the thumbnails of a running application that pop-up as your mouse over the application window in the task bar, aren’t new to Windows 7 – they were introduced in Vista actually – but their behavior have changed slightly. In Windows 7, task bar applications are grouped together if more than one iteration of the application is running. Meaning, rather than multiple browser windows showing in your task bar, they are all consolidated under a single large icon. Mouse-over that icon and you are presented thumbnails of the currently opened web sites within each.

You may like it, you may not. For me, it’s unnecessary as I just want to get into the running browser session quickly and rarely any of the particularly opened tabs. Thankfully, all three of the major browsers have the capability to disable this feature – though it’s easier to accomplish in some more than others.

Firefox

As you may expect, disabling of the previews requires diving into Firefox’s about:config – just type it into the location bar within the browser.

Filter for the key browser.taskbar.previews.enable and double click on the returned line to change the Value from true to false. This key will toggle the functionality on and off so it’s pretty simple to revert the change in the future!

Chrome

Google Chrome was the last of the three major browsers to obtain the taskbar previews functionality. Unfortunately, Google has a ways to go on their usability when it comes to making preferences tweaking – simply it’s not possible for many things! The only way I’ve found to disable the previews at the time of this article and version of Chrome is to leverage a clever hack centering around Windows Compatibility Mode of all things!

In Explorer, browse to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\ and right-click on chrome.exe, selecting Properties.

Under the Compatibility tab check the box that reads Run this program in compatibility mode for: then in the drop-down choose Windows Vista (Service Pack 2). Chrome will now run as if it were under Vista – that is to say, without the taskbar previews.

Internet Explorer 8

For completeness sake, the feature can also be disabled in IE even though I suspect most users interested in such a tweak won’t be in this browser much. Ironically, it’s probably the easiest one to change of the three!

Within IE8 access Tools->Internet Options. Off the General tab locate and click the Settings button in the Tab section.

From the Tab Browsing Settings dialog look for the check box that reads Show previews for individual windows in the taskbar and un-check.

While many Firefox users are rather reliant on their vast collection of installed extensions, few of them actively look at the list of installed add-ons through the browser interface. Users install the add-on they need to provide the functionality they desire; sometimes they get an update notification when a new version is available, but otherwise it’s a decent example of out of sight out of mind.

The mindset is perfectly acceptable until the situation Microsoft created in June’s monthly patch Tuesday. As part of their Windows updates released, one such patch included a Search Helper extension for your browser. Diligent users who skim over what each patch or update provides would still likely miss something like this – which calls into question why Microsoft would go this route as transparency is greatly craved by users. Chances are, this extension is registered within your Firefox browser and you didn’t even know it! What’s rather annoying is the add-on does absolutely nothing unless you have the Bing Toolbar installed. Worse, the extension cannot be uninstalled like the traditional Firefox add-on!

While this screen shot is from Firefox 4, Firefox 3 also has the Remove button .. removed. While it is possible to Disable the add-on, good security practice would not leave software installed that wasn’t needed. So what are your options?

Thankfully it’s actually pretty simple to remove the Search Helper Extension – it’s actually located on your file system under C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Search Enhancement Pack\Search Helper

Navigate to that folder location in Windows Explorer and delete the folder firefoxextension. Actually, while you are here you might as well delete it from Internet Explorer by removing the dll file SEPsearchhelperie.dll.

Adventurous users are probably already aware that the latest incarnation of the Firefox browser was released as a public beta earlier this week – Firefox 4.0b1. In addition to numerous under the hood feature expansion, the most immediate change to users will be the new user interface which features a rather drastic departure from the traditional Firefox interface. If you’ve used Google Chrome or Opera, you’ve already seem some the influence they’ve had on Firefox 4. Quite simply, the interface is stunning – leverage Aero Glass in Windows and moving the tabs to the top of the browser Window (like Opera and Chrome ..).

I’ve been using the browser off and on since it’s release and the experience has been more or less positive. One niggling problem centers around Firefox’s greatest asset, it’s vast array of add-ons. Long-time Firefox users know that every major release of the browser brings about “incompatibilities” with add-ons developed for older versions of Firefox. The word incompatibility is put into quotes because for many add-ons, they work just fine and the whole process is just a safe guard to potential problems. The simplest approach to enabling these extensions is downloading and installing the Nightly Tester Tools extension. The extension effectively removes the browser version check on add-ons, thus keeping them enabled on the latest Firefox beta. This is often enough to allow for a return to full functionality – but it’s not always the case.

One of the catch-22′s in this process is quickly apparent if you’ve followed the link above and attempt to install the Nightly Tester Tools in the 4.0 beta. Firefox blocks the install because the add-on is not compatible!

It’s possible to disable this check thankfully, user beware, by venturing into Firefox’s about:config through the address bar.

Inside about:config, right-click anywhere and select New->Boolean.

In the resulting pop-up dialog, we want to create a Preference named extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0b

Finally, set the preference value to False.

The change is applied immediately; you should be able to return to the previously blocked extension install page, Nightly Tester Tools in our case, and continue with the installation.

You will be quite surprised to see many, if not all, your extensions work just fine in the latest beta. Nevertheless, there is always a possibility they won’t – where you are then in a waiting game for the developer to publish an updated extension.

Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in collaboration with the Tor anonymous routing project released a public beta of their security and privacy conscious Firefox extension. Inspired by Google’s latest SSL encrypted search option, HTTPS Everywhere extends that concept to other websites. Visiting a website known to the extension will automatically switch your browsing session over to an SSL or HTTPS connection.

HTTPS Everywhere, while greatly useful, is not the giant panacea that you might imagine – simply because web sites must be preconfigured for the addon to work it’s magic. It has no discoverability option to determine when an SSL connection is available on a website you are perusing unencrypted. Still, the addon comes preconfigured to support many of the most popular websites including: Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, or even news sites like NY Times and Washington Post.  For industrious users, there exists a method to create your own matching rule sets so you are free to expand the functionality to any and all sites you choose. The rule sets look for a specified URL address and then rewrite the link to instead traverse over SSL – pretty simple yet genius in the same breath.

Here is an example straight from the EFF howto:

<ruleset name="Twitter">
  <rule from="^http://twitter\.com" to="https://twitter.com"/>
  <rule from="^http://www\.twitter\.com" to="https://twitter.com"/>
</ruleset>

If writing your own customized rule sets sounds a bit too much you’ll be happy to know the addon will be updated by the EFF and Tor, promising wider and wider compatibility – there’s already been one update since I’ve been testing the extension in fact.

Installation is painless; just download and the rest happens automatically. After a quick Firefox reboot, HTTPS Everywhere just works with zero configuration. If, for some reason, you wish to disable a particular site all the SSL redirection is toggled by a simple check-box. Simple – just as I like!

Download HTTPS Everywhere for Firefox

Think back – can you remember what web browsing was like before the advent of tabs? It’s hard to imagine life without the tab-based interface tweak popularized by Firefox many years ago. Tabs weren’t anything new, at least in the user interface of other applications yet when the style made the jump to the browser it was thought of as revolutionary.

How many tabs do you have open in your browser currently? If you are like most, it’s probably pushing a dozen or so! We rely and depend upon them after all. However, each tab consumes resources such as memory or CPU cycles. Open too many and your browser starts to crawl, or worse – crash. The situation turns to dire as relaunching the browser typically finds the configuration set to restore all the previously opened tabs. If the browser survives the reload it typically takes awhile to get it back into a responsive state as it’s forced to load and process each of the opened tabs, whether you are ready to use them or not.

BarTab is a Firefox extension that can assist you in reigning in your use of tabs and their effects on your system resources. BarTab prevents tabs from sucking down resources when they aren’t the activate tab. When the tapped tab is accessed, only then is the content of the site loaded. The behavior can be tweaked independently for tabs opened in the background during an existing session, or tabs that are opened upon a browser relaunch – such as after a crash. Tabs that have been put on tab are greyed out until they are clicked upon. Additionally, BarTab can unload previously loaded tabs from memory, either automatically or manually.

BarTab is an essential add-on for any Firefox user that requires and uses the tab system – which, quite frankly, is most of us!

Download BarTab

Technology has allowed for us all to become quite lazy with our spelling. Spell-check is common place and unfortunately, more and more people are relying on the software to compose properly spelled and grammatically correct sentences. Clearly there is a lot of good and an equal amount of a bad with this trend. Nothing is more frustrating than composing a well thought out email response to your boss, clicking send, and then in a glance notice an embarrassing spelling error.

While many applications contain at least some form of spell-check capability, not all of them are in your face about the errors they detect. For some, the spell-check must be user initiated rather than checking words as they are typed. While this method is dwindling, it still exists. Firefox, however, is not such an application. Rather, misspelled words are identified by a red squiggly line underneath.

One of the problems I have with Firefox’s approach is the identification marker in a large wall of text is easy to ignore, for me at least. Interestingly, Firefox provides a few visual options to attract your attention – but not through it’s preferences interface. Instead, you are forced to dig deeper.

From the Firefox address bar access about:config and accept any warning messages.

In the Filter box search for ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle. A default Firefox install likely will not have this key – your search will return nothing.

If that proves the case, it’s simple enough to create it. Right-click in the blank area and select New->Integer.

Give the key the name ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle as above. For the integer value you have a few options – this is what controls the visual cue for when a misspelling occurs.

• 0 is for no highlighting
• 1 is for a dotted line
• 2 is for a long dotted line
• 3 is for a single straight line
• 4 is for a double straight line, as shown below.
• 5 is for a squiggly line, the default when no key is present.

I choose option 4 as it really draw’s my attention to a problem, making sloppy typos or misspellings extremely tough to ignore. See for yourself!

Another day, another Adobe Flash exploit – except this time there is no fix available yet from Adobe. Comforting isn’t it? I’ve had enough, the reality is I’m giving up on Flash and have removed the install from my system. In the past few months there appears to have been just as many Flash security updates as there were Windows updates. Are the days of Flash’s dominance on the web over with? Apple seems to think just that – none of their mobile devices support Flash, though the rationale has probably less to do with security concerns. The next web mark-up standard, HTML5, will becoming to all the major browsers quite soon and will introduce a lot of the functionality web developers rely on Flash to accomplish today.

After uninstalling the Adobe Flash plugin one of the first things to jump out at you is Firefox’s gentle reminder that Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page. The popup appears at the top of the offending web page and while you can click it away, it returns on every valid circumstance. You’d be surprised how much Flash is utilized where you aren’t expecting it!

What are your options at this point? Short of clicking out of the message every time and just living with the annoyance because at least you know you are browsing safer than many other users, your options are pretty limited. So to that, I’ll give you the best option – disable Firefox’s warning message altogether!

In the address bar enter about:config

Use the Filter box for locate the key plugin.default_plugin_disabled

Double-click on the line to toggle the setting from true to false

The warning message should now be suppressed. However, it is important to realize that this affects every plugin warning message – not just Flash. Truthfully, this isn’t a huge concern for most however.

Yesterday I detailed the process on relocating Google Chrome’s user profile directory and today I’m going to describe the steps necessary to do the same in Firefox. First, let’s revisit why this may be something you wish to do.

Solid state drives or SSD are gaining popularity by leaps and bounds. The performance improvements over a traditional hard drive are astounding and as the price continues to fall, the upgrade option becomes available to a wider range of budgets. While SSD is lightening quick there still remains a few draw backs. First, the size available is limited, at least at sanely priced units – this limits them to mainly your operating system and application installs and not your collection of media; you’d need a second hard drive for that. In the end, that’s a small compromise for many. Secondly, SSD has the notion of limited writes. Simply, the drive can only be written to a certain amount of times before it becomes worn out. It should be stated that USB thumb drives or other types of memory cards, such as for your camera, suffer the same problem.

While limiting the writing of data to the SSD is good a computing practice, it’s not something to overly stress over. However, there are a number of customizations that you should strongly consider that are painless, and can help limit the writes – all without really affecting the overall performance.

One such tweak involves relocating your browser user and cache directory off your speedy SSD C drive onto a secondary drive. As every visit to every web page generally involves the writing of some cache information to the disk, moving this off of SSD is logical.

Like Chrome, Firefox doesn’t make this relocation process apparent in their user interface. Rather, the change is accessible by accessing about:config from the address bar.

From the Filter box search for the key browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. If the key doesn’t exist, as it didn’t in my default Firefox 3.6 install, it can be created by right-clicking and choosing New->String.

For the string value provide a path to a folder on your secondary hard drive that you wish to use; restarting Firefox to apply the change. Here I chose the folder d:\ff_cache.